Countywide : 3 Youngsters Saved in 2 House Fires

Three youngsters escaped injury Tuesday after being rescued from burning houses in Anaheim and Mission Viejo. Officials said both fires were started by children playing with cigarette lighters.

At 11:45 a.m. in Anaheim, police said, two passing patrol officers broke out a window and pulled a 4-year-old boy from his family’s burning house.

In Mission Viejo nearly three hours earlier, a baby-sitter managed to gather up two children and escape a fire that destroyed about one-quarter of a home at 9 a.m. Tuesday, a County Fire Department official said.

No one was hurt in either of the incidents.

Anaheim Police Sgt. Jim George said Officers Robert Flores and James Mosier were in the area of Citron and Northgate streets assisting other officers in a robbery investigation when they noticed smoke billowing from a nearby house.

Rushing to the 900 block of Citron, the officers found a house engulfed in flames and Martha Bedolla standing outside screaming that her 4-year-old son, Benjamin, was trapped inside.

After calling for fire units and backup police, Flores and Mosier tried to enter the home through the front door but were pushed back by intense flames.

Running to the side of the house, they used their batons to break out windows until they found the child, scared but unhurt, George said. The officers pulled the child from the house and returned him to his mother.

An Anaheim Fire Department investigation determined that the fire was caused by several children playing in the house with a lighter, George said. The other children escaped without injury.

The 9 a.m. Mission Viejo blaze started in the bedroom of a home in the 24000 block of Zancon when a 3-year-old ignited a bed with a cigarette lighter, Fire Department Capt. Hank Raymond said.

When the baby-sitter heard a fire alarm, she ran in and grabbed the 3-year-old and a 5-year-old in an adjacent bedroom, stopping in the kitchen to dial 911, Raymond said. Before the call was connected with police, however, the baby-sitter ran outside and across the street and called from a neighbor’s home.

“If they would have had a sprinkler system, the fire would have been controlled almost immediately and the damage would have been limited to the bedroom,” Raymond said.

As it was, 50% to 60% of the structure was damaged to some degree and about one-fourth of the home was destroyed, according to Raymond.